Stian's Ministry Newsletter

 Summer Focus Just because the school year is finished doesn't mean the ministry has! The summer begins a new season and a time to rest and prepare for next school year. June has been a busy and different month now that the 22-23 school year has come to a close. While a lot of our students at UTD head home for the summer, those who remain get the opportunity to experience our Thursday Night Summer Fellowships. Every summer our ministry continues meeting together weekly to worship, learn and fellowship, but the summer brings new friends! All of our DFW Focus campuses come together every Thursday over the summer and fellowship together. It is so neat to see all of our students from across campuses, meeting and getting to know one another. Often, when we're only on our own campuses we can forget about all of the work God is doing at other colleges throughout DFW. Summer Focus is a great reminder that our connection can go far beyond our school and can spread across the metroplex! ...

  CLOSING OF A CHAPTER This past May has been a very busy month with the end of the 2022-2023 school year and the end of my apprenticeship. This month we finished several of our apprentice classes, visited our sister ministry in Bellingham, Washington for a student ministry conference, and delivered our final sermons for the school year. I have been grateful to have spent the last 10 months serving students and building community as a campus missionary. God has blessed our campus and ministry in a lot of ways this year and it has been fun to share those with you all! End-of-Year Party Of course, with the end of the school year, it's time to celebrate! We are always excited to celebrate the hard work of our students both in their academics and in their faithfulness to the Lord and his community at UTD. This year we decided to surprise our students with a summer-themed party to send them off to their holiday excited for vacation. I got to take a few pictures with Jonathan, Mick, and ...

The Month of April This month was another really fun month of campus ministry! It is really wild that the school year is so quickly coming to a close and the last of our small group meetings are about to end. I have been so grateful for this year in multiple ways. I’ve gotten to study the Bible with some really smart and thoughtful guys, lead worship with an exciting and energetic community and learned so much about the Bible and theology!  Resurrection Fair This month was a really special month as we celebrated Easter and Resurrection Sunday with the entirety of the UTD campus. For the past few years, we have hosted and celebrated what we call Rez Fair, to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus. This year's Rez Fair was another great experience of showing UTD the love of Christ and the excitement of celebrating him. We partnered with all of the different ministries at UTD and several churches from around the Richardson area, who shared what the resurrection of Jesus means to them. We...

  Yard Sign Fiasco Well, this past month was a whirlwind of activity at UTD. March was filled with lots of fun, fellowship, and theft! You read correctly! We had yard sign thievery! Apart from the excitement of our yard signs, this month we had the pleasure of playing host to out-of-state friends and had a great time of out reaching to the students of UTD.   The Yard Signs A couple weeks ago before UTDs spring break, our team came up with a new and exciting plan to advertise our sermon series that we started for the rest of the semester. The sermon series revolved around the question, "Does Jesus Care About _____". The sermons have been talking about poverty, depression, politics, dating, and so many other topics. Like any good advertising campaign, we took our main tagline question of "Does Jesus Care About ____" and posted yard signs all around campus. Boy oh boy did were we met with a surprising response from the students. Their response came in the form of steal...

  Fun February It was been another incredible month of ministry this month! I hope you enjoy this month's ministry update and are encouraged by all the exciting things going on at UTD! Celebrating Black History Month This month Focus hosted a special event celebrating Black History Month! This was our first-ever showcase celebrating black culture and talent called Release. This year we have been focusing on what it looks like for our community to celebrate and honor the diverse cultures that our students come from. Release was a fun and exciting event to highlight what our students love about their culture and heritage. The event was filled with singing, dancing, and spoken word! It was a hit event! I think our community and the university really enjoyed the whole event. Focus Alumni Something that is really neat about this community is the lifelong friends I have gotten to make. It is such a neat chance for our students to meet and befriend other students who become some of their ...

 NEW YEARS MINISTRY Hello there and welcome to January's blog update! 2023 has already been a roller coaster of events for the UTD FOCUS ministry, including ups and downs, and I'm excited to share with you all what has been going on so far.  Winter Retreat  Every year we start out with our biggest event for all of the FOCUS campuses, Winter Retreat. This year we moved our retreat to a new location and changed the name from Winter Camp to Winter Retreat. This year's retreat was at the Riverbend Camp in Glenrose Texas. We invite all of our FOCUS students from all of our DFW campuses to drive out for the weekend to fellowship, worship and have fun. It was a really successful retreat and so many of our students enjoyed their time at the camp. It is always encouraging to hear about how fired up our students get for camp and after camp going back to their campuses.  This retreat was also the first time I got to lead one of our worship sets! Last year would have been the fi...

  Merry Ministry! December was a short but fulfilling month of ministry! Our students were busy finishing up their finals for the year and getting ready for the Winter break. While our students were busy, their campus pastors were busy as well. This last month marks the end of the 2022 year and a halfway point in the pastoral apprenticeship for myself and my fellow apprentices. This school year has been an exciting time to watch how God has worked in the lives of our students and I am even more excited to see how he continues to work through this next year. Christmas Party What would the holiday season be without a little Christmas Party? Or in our case a very large party! Seeing as how we have about 200 students in our ministry at UTD, our Christmas parties are quite the event to plan. This year I got to see behind the scenes with the planning of the Christmas party and boy were there a lot of things to do. Thankfully I work with an amazing team that loves our students so well. Th...